<p>hmmm… well, merributt, persian=farsi, and it’s very difficult for americans to get there, esp to volunteer, so it’s not worth it except for security.</p>
<p>honestly, chinese is awesome for business, but it’s not worth it for what you want to do. Chinese is SO difficult- I’ve put hundreds of hours into it, and lived in Taiwan for a year, and still can’t read a children’s book. You need to really love the language to study it. Also, China is so rich- there are many other countries that need your help more.</p>
<p>French is an excellent option. You’ve got a huge portion of Africa, as well as some parts of the Carribbean and Asia, to work in with French. Spanish is also great. I say stick with those languages. Arabic, like Chinese, is extremely difficult (I study it as well), and is not worth it unless you’re absolutely sure about it. Also, Arab countries, though many are poor, tend not to be as poor as French-speaking African countries.</p>
<p>There are a number of issues to consider. For Chinese, consider the fact that you could learn 3-4 phonetically or alphabetically-based languages in the time that you could learn Chinese, and it’s not likely to get you much. </p>
<p>I can’t think of one country where knowing Chinese would involve you on the ground in large humanitarian or public health kinds of emergencies. The Chinese, for instance, are not going to let you into Tibet or Xinyang. I worked in Indonesia and my Mandarin was helpful on a World Bank project I worked there, but this was only because one of our project assistants was Chinese. Only 2% of the population is Chinese. Etc.</p>
<p>See this earlier thread about Chinese vs. Portuguese:</p>
<p>On the other hand, China itself is becoming a bigger and bigger actor on the international scene in terms of flows of aid or tied aid dollars (usually as I understand it to secure oil rights), so maybe knowing it would help you deal with an important player. But this is of dubious value, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Some have said French is not worth learning, and if you want to stay in the US, I agree. But for international public health/humanitarian issues, Francophone Africa itself could provide you with a career’s worth of work.</p>
<p>Spanish has a very good effort expended/value achieved ratio for you.</p>
<p>Arabic particularly but also Russian could be of good value, though with these and especially Arabic, you are talking about really tough languages to learn. Also, different kinds of Arabic are spoken in different countries and in classes one learns the classic Arabic.</p>
<p>One thing to consider: there are good scholarships ($25,000 good) available at many grad schools for Chinese, Arabic, and a couple of other tough ones. If you got a head start with one of these languages, you could potentially fund your grad school education. These scholarships are competitive, though, and you have to schmooze the people within the school you are attending who actually make the decision (best to ask about this scholarship before you actually choose a a school and get some commitments from the people who make the decision to fund you). FLAS is what they’re called and I think they’re given by the Dept. of Education or maybe the Dep. of State.</p>
<p>I think an element you most need to consider is where your skills will actually get used. I mentioned that you aren’t going to be granted access in countries where Chinese is heavily spoken to help with humanitarian emergencies/public health kinds of issues. On the other hand, in most of Africa, and in some situations in Latin America, you would.</p>
<p>Another way of looking at this question is to consider areas of civil war or future areas of flooding owing to global warming (e.g., Bangladesh), find out what languages are spoken there and if you’d be given access to pursue activities there and choose that or those languages.</p>
<p>If you are looking for certain economic gain now rather than 10+ years down the road (as MIGHT be the case with Mandarin), then the languages that would make a great deal of sense would be Japanese or German. After the US, Japan and Germany currently have the second and third biggest economies and very few native English speakers that speak their languages (however, in my experience, most Germans can speak excellent English).</p>
<p>Aside from these, with the continued immigration from Spanish speaking countries, Spanish would make a lot of sense. Spanish is WORLDS easier than Japanese, and a smaller percentage of the Spanish speaking community speaks English than Germans do.</p>
<p>For humanitarian issues, French would be a good choice as numerous countries in Africa speak it as a first or second language.</p>
<p>Just learn all the languages that are relevant to your desired area of work. This of course, may involve a humanitarian corroboration between many ethnicities and international countries. </p>
<p>No really. Most people I met at the ICJ, EU Parli, UN branches, all knew multiple languages. I’ve rarely met a humanitarian worker who knew only only two languages. The documents used at the UN are translated into 7 languages on a daily basis too. It takes hard work to change lives :).</p>
<p>You’re all cheaters!!! You just learn languages that have something in common with languages that you already know, so that you can rely on cognates and simular gramatical structures! Here’s what you should study to be a real master:</p>
<p>Classical Chinese
Modern Finnish
Middle English
Russian
Classical Arabic
Hebrew
Cherokee</p>
<p>There! Study these and I guarentee learning ‘2-3 languages in a flash’ won’t be so easy! You’re all just cheating by studying Itallian, Spanish, Portugese and latin at the same time!!!</p>
<p>Learning languages that have cognates can be helpful – like Latin (can help you understand your own language better). In addition, if you didn’t know, many of the languages that are useful happen to be related to English. You’ll notice, also, that people have suggested Asian languages, which, in many cases, are language isolates…</p>
<p>“China is, and u said it wasnt.
CHina is the second richest nation in the world.
Also, singapore is freakin rich.”</p>
<p>Ya, I’m going to have to disagree. China might be making huge gains in its economy over these last several years, but it means nothing overall. Where is most of the money going? Ask yourself; Hong Kong + government or CHINA?</p>
<p>Yes, as am I. The “nation” IS the people. A nation is some territory inhabited by a people with ethnic, religious, way of life, etc similarities. A STATE, which is what you are refering to, is some political entity. </p>
<p>So after correct terminology, the STATE of China is rich. But once again, who cares? It means nothing. China might be making all the gains in the world, but when a very minimal of these gains goes to the public, China’s power is severly diminished on a grand scale. </p>
<p>Ex: China might be raking in the dough’ to fund its military, but what happens when the people of China have nothing to look forward to? Order and productivity go down, which affects the way China can utilize its military (global or domestic problems; right now China has a few global problems to worry about, North Korea, Japan, and the US to name a few).</p>
<p>Ok, after hijacking this thread and traveling wayyy off course, learn French. A LOT of “third world” countries speak it.</p>
<p>Here’s my ranking for an English-speaking resident of the United States:</p>
<ol>
<li>Spanish/French (French is #1 for outside North America, one of the official languages of a billion international institutions, most importantly the UN)</li>
<li>German (strongest economy in Europe)</li>
<li>Arabic - Intelligence/ Military</li>
<li>Russian - Intelligence/ Military/ Work in former Soviet Union (IAEA, etc) 5. Chinese - Because many of the Chinese you’ll be dealing with will already know English, and will prefer you not to speak Chinese, sadly enough.</li>
<li>Japanese - Same goes for Japanese as Chinese…strongest economy in Asia</li>
<li>Portuguese - Brazil </li>
<li>Turkish</li>
<li>Italian - fashion industry, along with French</li>
<li>Polish, if you happen to find yourself in Chicago during Polish Constitution Day.</li>
</ol>
<p>I learned German and Frech…Both are spoken in Africa, because both Germany and France had colonies there…and Dutch is also good, but english speakers can’t get the tone down and whole weird lip/throat movements sto save our lives…</p>
<p>Tokyorevelation, I found your list interesting only because the reasoning behind it was so occult. I would have to say to anyone looking at what languages to learn that, if they didn’t know English, they should start there. It’s not enough to look at the following list:</p>
<p>Most Commonly Spoken Languages
Rank Language Number of Speakers
1 Chinese (Mandarin) 1,000,000,000 +
2 English 508,000,000
3 Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) 497,000,000
4 Spanish 392,000,000
5 Russian 277,000,000
6 Arabic 246,000,000
7 Bengali 211,000,000
8 Portuguese 191,000,000
9 Malay-Indonesian 159,000,000
10 French 129,000,000 </p>
<p>I think it’s better to look at the following list, which derives from the named rating factors:</p>
<p>After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world’s ten most influential languages:
(number of points given in parentheses)</p>
<p>English (37)
French (23)
Spanish (20)
Russian (16)
Arabic (14)
Chinese (13)
German (12)
Japanese (10)
Portuguese (10)
Hindi/Urdu (9) </p>
<p>Beyond English, you have to make some judgement calls, IMO. If you want to do journalism, what stories/regions do you want to cover? Terrorism/Middle East/Oil? Learn Arabic. Africa? Learn French. Economies? Learn Chinese or Hindi or even Portuguese.</p>
<p>Remember that learning Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps Russian (I don’t know about Hindi) will require sometimes much more effort than learning one of the simpler European languages. E.g., they say you can learn 4 europeans in the time it takes to learn Chinese.</p>
<p>In terms of difficulty of learning, here’s how teachers rated the following languages. The higher the number, the more difficult the language.</p>
<p>French 2.4 Spanish 1.45 Italian 2.73 German 4.00 Russian 6.1 Chinese 8.64 Japanese 8.18 Latin 3.18 Ancient Greek 6.2 Hebrew 7.4 Arabic 7.91 </p>
<p>Though it’s rated as being easier here, I have personally heard that Japanese is harder than Chinese from a person who mastered both (at Berkeley, Harvard, and in Asia). I found the following analysis on the web:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Good luck. For me, it really boiled down to be about the ladies. As superficial as that sounds, it’s the truth. I tend to like women from romance language-based cultures. Though it wasn’t ultimately my cup of tea, my male friends who learned Chinese and stuck with it (I basically gave up after a few years only because I didn’t want to stay in Asia) did so because they liked the ladies – and then it became a good career choice for them as well. With me, I started on Chinese for career, but ended on Portuguese for love – or for something a bit more visceral and sometimes related to love.</p>
<p>List of countries by GDP per capita
17. Singapore $32867
23. Taiwan $30084
70. Thailand $9084
87. China $7598</p>
<p>China is not the second richest nation in the world…lol </p>
<p>Despite its economic surge in the past few years, the average earnings for Chinese citizens have not increased significantly. The gap between the wealth and the poor has become greater though.</p>
<p>But seriously, for the purpose of the question at hand, I would think richest which could be measured in per capita or absolute terms, would be defined in absolute terms. Iceland is pretty high up on the world’s list of richest nations. But that doesn’t mean that you should go out and learn Icelandic right away.</p>
<p>Even though China is only the 4th largest economy in the world now, if you learn Chinese you can communicate with most Taiwanese very well anyway.</p>